Home > Positioning > Persons > Mokyr

Joel Mokyr (1946–)

Mokyr has spent his career on one question: why sustained technological progress, and with it modern economic growth, began in Europe in the eighteenth century and not before or elsewhere. His answer puts knowledge at the centre. Growth became self-sustaining when what people knew about nature and what they knew how to do began to feed each other, and that happened because a culture of open inquiry, the Enlightenment’s belief in useful knowledge, had taken hold among the people who could put it to work. He treats technology as an evolutionary process, with techniques as the units that vary and are selected, while refusing to force it into biology’s categories. In 2025 he shared the Nobel prize in economics “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”.

Joel Mokyr was born on 26 July 1946 in Leiden, to a family of Dutch Jews who had survived the Holocaust, and grew up in Israel. He studied economics and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (BA 1968) and took his PhD in economics at Yale in 1974, with a dissertation on industrial growth and stagnation in the Low Countries. He has taught at Northwestern University since 1974, where he holds the Robert H. Strotz professorship, and is also Sackler Professor by special appointment at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University. He received the Heineken Prize for History in 2006 and the Balzan Prize in 2015. The 2025 Nobel prize, awarded “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth”, went half to Mokyr and half jointly to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction”.

Key concepts

Macroinventions and microinventions. The Lever of Riches (1990) surveyed technological change from classical antiquity to the twentieth century and distinguished two kinds of invention. Macroinventions are radical new ideas that appear without clear precedent, such as the steam engine or the hot-air balloon; microinventions are the small, incremental improvements that adapt them, make them work and spread them. Most productivity growth comes from microinventions, but they run out without new macroinventions to work on, and Mokyr compared the pattern to punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary biology.

Useful knowledge. The Gifts of Athena (2002) divided useful knowledge into two sets: propositional knowledge, knowledge what about natural phenomena and regularities, and prescriptive knowledge, knowledge how, the instructions that make up techniques. Every technique rests on some epistemic base in the first set, however narrow. Before the eighteenth century that base was usually thin, so techniques could be improved only by trial and error and improvement soon stalled; the change came when the propositional set widened and became accessible, and the two sets began to reinforce each other.

The Industrial Enlightenment. The Enlightened Economy (2009), on Britain from 1700 to 1850, located the source of that change in what Mokyr calls the Industrial Enlightenment: the Baconian programme of using knowledge of nature to improve production, carried by a network of scientists, engineers and skilled artisans who shared information through societies, journals and correspondence. Britain led, on this account, because it had many such people and institutions that let them work.

A culture of growth. A Culture of Growth (2016) traced the programme back to the early modern “Republic of Letters”, a transnational community of scholars competing for reputation in a market for ideas that no single state or church could close. Cultural entrepreneurs, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton above all, changed what educated Europeans believed about knowledge and progress, and the political fragmentation of Europe let dissenting ideas survive by moving across borders.

Technology as an evolutionary process. Mokyr has written about technological change in evolutionary terms since the 1990s. His unit is the technique, “a set of instructions on how to do something that involves production”, and the relation between propositional and prescriptive knowledge is, in his words, “somewhat reminiscent of the relation between the genotype and the phenotype”. He does not take the analogy further than it goes: “the biological paradigm is too limiting for an explanation of cultural phenomena such as technology: in nature there is no feedback from the manifest entity to the underlying structure”, and in technology there is. He rejected the demand that every element of biology find a counterpart in the other discipline.

Where Mokyr stops

The explanation he gives for the Industrial Revolution has been pressed from two directions. Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009) argued that Britain industrialised first because its wages were high and its coal cheap, so that labour-saving, energy-using machines paid there and nowhere else; on Allen’s account the incentives explain the inventions, and since the scientific culture Mokyr describes was shared across Europe, it could not by itself explain why industrialisation began in Britain. Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000) put the break between Europe and the most advanced parts of China late, around 1800, and attributed it to accessible coal and the resources of the Americas rather than to a long cultural preparation.

Key works

See also: Evolution · Technology · Schumpeter · Nelson · Arthur